Flames were coming for people in their beds, in the middle of the night, announced with the dire and haunting words we became used to over these terrible months. "It's too late to leave; shelter in place" -Lisa Pryor
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| Australian Wildfires Illuminate the Night followmehere.com |
It may seem distant history, at the rate with which the world moves from disaster to tragedy, but a few months ago the world was watching the progress of massive wildfires that blanketed Australia. We saw the pictures of charred landscapes, ashen ruins of homes, and burnt animals approaching responders for help. We read the statistics of the unprecedented natural catastrophe that was sweeping across the smallest inhabited continent. Three thousand homes destroyed in New South Wales, 46 million hectares (or 114 million acres) of land burned, and thirty-four lives lost.
Yet, while news flashes kept us abreast of the extent of the destruction, the reason for this tragic disaster was more elusive. Why were these wildfires so bad? Was this year somehow different than other years? Will the fires continue to get worse? These were questions that most articles did not try to answer. Those affected were too focused on survival to worry about causes or consequences. Thankfully, the fires have been subdued for the time being and restoration has begun. Now Australia and the world can take a breath to wonder why this devastating force arrived at this place and time.
As mentioned before, the 2019-2020 Australian Wildfires were enormous. Shockingly so, even if you followed the news of their movements. 46 million hectares burned over the course of the fire season. For some reference, fires in California only burned 100,000 hectares in 2019 and 404,680 hectares in 2018. It is estimated that one billion animals were killed. It has been estimated that the fires cost the country $2.4 billion dollars. The fire season truly was one of record-breaking scale.
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| Areas burned by the 2019 Wildfires wikipedia.org |
Despite the gruesome picture that recently has been painted, fire has a natural place in Australia's environment. Like the American West, the Australian ecosystem depends on fires, both natural and man-made, to clear away the scrub and brush that clogs its soil. Many plant species need the intense heat from fires to trigger their seeds to sprout, and many more are resilient to the damage that flames may cause. However, in recent years the fires have been growing in intensity and size, overtaking the resiliency that the ecosystem has evolved. As Sarah Legge mentions, "There are habitats that are burning that we didn't think should or would ever burn. (The subtropical rainforest) is not flammable habitat. It's evolved over many millennia without fire, and a lot of the species there aren't resilient".
So if the fires are natural and expected, why were the most recent ones so overwhelming? There are a number of factors, but lets start at the national level and expand out. Many point the finger at the policy of fire suppression that has been in place since the colonization of the continent by Europeans. As one recent article explains:
Aboriginal communities have long set small fires to carefully manage their landscapes, creating food and habitat for animals, and producing scars that reduce the extent and intensity of fires during the hotter periods. But colonizers suppressed this practice, whether through murder, regulation, or pushing indigenous people into missions and reserves where they were disconnected from their traditions. Following the loss of such practices, fires are more frequent, intense, and extensive.To be fair to the Australian government, in recent years they have implemented programs of prescribed burns to try and offset damages brought about by wildfires, similar to programs in the United States. However, studies have shown that the accumulation of charcoal in the country is at its greatest levels in 70,000 years, suggesting that fire authorities are still behind the curve in this aspect.
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| An Australian Ranger Demonstrates a Prescribed Burn The Conversation |
Expanding the scope a little, reveals a more broad and global culprit for these intense fires, climate change. Since 1910, Australia's climate has warmed by just over 1 degree Celsius, causing not only the change in temperature but also in rain and wind patterns. Australia is currently in the midst of a severe drought, after having three winters in a row with very little precipitation. This dryness has been coupled with high winds, in some areas as high as 80 mph, and record breaking heat to create the severe wildfire events that we saw scouring Australia. Unfortunately, climate models only expect things to get worse. As one paper explains, "our study suggests that 'hot droughts' and 'press droughts', both anticipated to occur more frequently throughout the 21st century according to the vast majority of models, can lead to fire weather conditions that have not been explored before and to subsequent increased frequency of Extreme Wildfire Events."
The effect of climate change on wildfires is not a purely Australian problem, as research in forest ecosystems in places like the Mediterranean and Western US have found an increase in fire intensity and size. One study focused in the Western United States discovered that, between 1985 and 2015, human-driven climate change was responsible for the addition of 4.2 million hectares of western US forest fire area. Unfortunately, unlike fire suppression policies, climate change is much harder to mitigate in the short-term and fire prone areas like Australia can expect to see a worsening of contributing factors.
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| A House Burns In Australia globalvoices.org |
The Australian wildfires of 2019-2020 were terrifying, enormous, and unprecedented; but they were not a random act of nature. They were signs of what is to come and what is to be normal. The fires were as bad as they were due to decades of fire suppression, climate change altering weather patterns, and the perfect combination of drought and high winds. While Australians, and residents of fire-prone areas around the world, can try and prepare for the next round, it may be too late to stem the tide of extreme fire events. Short term solutions seem improbable, but perhaps long term strategies can avoid the worsening dangers that our planet faces. As Lisa Pryor, an Australian writing for the New York Times stated:
The time has come for us to put away childish things and reckon with climate change, to do what we can to prevent a future in which extreme weather is more intense and more frequent. This time around, it was Australia that suffered, that served as a warning of our planet's climate change future. Many other places will follow in the coming years."
References:
Abatzoglou John T., & Williams A. Park. (2016). Impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western US forests. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(42), 11770.
CNN, J. Y. (n.d.). What you need to know about Australia’s deadly wildfires. CNN. Retrieved January 19, 2020, from https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/01/australia/australia-fires-explainer-intl-hnk-scli/index.html
Irfan, U. (2019, December 30). Australia’s hellish heat wave and wildfires, explained. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2019/12/30/21039298/40-celsius-australia-fires-2019-heatwave-climate-change
J. Ruffault, T. Curt, N. K. Martin-StPaul, V. Moron, & R. M. Trigo. (2018). Extreme wildfire events are linked to global-change-type droughts in the northern Mediterranean. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 847. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-847-2018
Lewis, D. (2020). ‘Deathly silent’: Ecologist describes Australian wildfires’ devastating aftermath. Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science, 577(7790), 304. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00043-2
Pryor, L. (2020, February 24). Opinion | Has Australia Reached a Climate Tipping Point? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/opinion/australia-fires-climate.html
Sengupta, S. (2020, February 5). How Europe Turned Into a Perfect Landscape for Wildfires. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/climate/forests-europe-climate-changed.html
Sharples, J. J., Cary, G. J., Fox-Hughes, P., Mooney, S., Evans, J. P., Fletcher, M.-S., Fromm, M., Grierson, P. F., McRae, R., & Baker, P. (2016). Natural hazards in Australia: Extreme bushfire. Climatic Change, 139(1), 85–99. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1811-1
Wright, A. (2020, January 15). Opinion | Want to Stop Australia’s Fires? Listen to Aboriginal People. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/opinion/australia-fires-aboriginal-people.html
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